A. S. Byatt Quotes

Our culture has created two almost irreconcilable descriptions of a 'good woman.' The first is the individual achiever; the second, the self-sacrificing domestic goddess.

I don't think 'Motherhood' is a map for women. I would never say that it's a template for every woman in response to her biology.

Women do feel like they're in a box. Society, Hollywood, some men-they want to wrap women up in a neat little package.

In my generation, except for a few people who'd gone into banking or nursing or something like that, middle-class women didn't have careers. You were to marry and have children and be a nice mother. You didn't go out and do anything. I found that I got restless.

Women shouldn't iron, ever. It's our wrinkles that make us interesting.

There's a lot more to being a woman than being 18 years old on the cover of Maxim magazine.

I'm definitely more attracted to chaos than to order. The point is, I find the female roles out there very cliche. If we are limited to being only lovers or mothers, we are limiting ourselves.

I think women have long been defined by their roles as procreators and wives, and we're expected to serve, take care of, say 'Yes,' and not ruffle any feathers. Women, in particular, are sometimes not allowed to consider who they are outside of the roles that they play.

My mom was sarcastic about men. She would tell me Adam was the rough draft and Eve was the final product. She was a feminist minister, an earth mom who wore a bra only on Sundays.

What I am defending is the real rights of women. A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother.

It used to be the one or the other, right? You were the 'bad girl' or the 'good girl' or the 'bad mother' or 'the good mother,' 'the horrible businesswoman who eschewed her children' or 'the earth mother who was happy to be at home baking pies,' all of that stuff that we sort of knew was a lie.

Most women are not programmed to prefer a great career to a great man and a family. They feel they were sold a bill of goods at college and by the media.

One of the sad commentaries on the way women are viewed in our society is that we have to fit one category. I have never felt that I had to be in one category.

Women are not trained to be housekeepers, nor to be wives, nor to be mothers ...

What is sad for women of my generation is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families. What were they to do when the children were grown — watch raindrops coming down the windowpane?

There's a great deal of tension between so many kind of distinctive and restrictive female archetypes and images in the world. When you play with the archetypes, you get free.

As women, our identity becomes subsumed by the fact that we are wives, daughters and mothers, and that becomes our all-encompassing identity. It happens with women because we are naturally driven towards being caretakers and being sacrificing.

All of the Arabic women I grew up listening to or watching had a very strong character.

I think a woman can have all of the ideas and mental pictures. She can be a real planner and a motivator. But in the end, I think a woman does best when she responds to a man.

'Single' is usually applied to women as though they are a problem to be fixed.

I know that there's a cultural expectation that women be nurturing, delicate flowers. And I am. So delicate. But that doesn't mean I can't write a good, gory murder scene.

I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.

We take men's obligation to earn money, and when they do it well, we blame them for having power and being oppressors. And when they don't do it all, women just don't marry men who are reading 'I'm Okay, You're Okay' in the unemployment line.

My mum is deeply, deeply a man's woman, a man's muse. Maybe because I'm a kid from the '80s, I'm a bit more dominant. I wanted to be the muse and the director also. I wanted to be the man and the woman.

The parts for women, you're either like the quietly suffering wife or the wild girl.